It occupies the entire western side of Broadway from Dey Street to Fulton Street.
The site was formerly occupied by the Western Union Telegraph Building. The current 29-story, 422-foot-tall (129 m) building was commissioned after AT&T's 1909 acquisition of Western Union. It was constructed from 1912 to 1916 under the leadership of Theodore Newton Vail, to designs by William W. Bosworth, although one section was not completed until 1922. It was the site of one end of the first transcontinental telephone call, the first intercity Picturephone call, and the first transatlantic telephone call. Though AT&T's headquarters relocated to 550 Madison Avenue in 1984, 195 Broadway remains in use as an office building as of 2022.
Bosworth's design was heavily Greek-influenced: though the facade is made of white Vermont granite, it features layers of gray granite columns in Doric and Ionic styles, as well as various Greek-inspired ornamentation. The northwestern corner of the building was designed similar to a campanile with a stepped roof, which formerly supported the Spirit of Communication statue. The Greek design carried into the large lobby, clad with marble walls and floors, and containing sculptural ornament by Paul Manship and Gaston Lachaise. The exterior and first-floor interior spaces were designated as city landmarks by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2006.
Site
195 Broadway is on the west side of Broadway, between Fulton Street to the north and Dey Street to the south, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. The building has a frontage of 275 feet (84 m) on Dey Street, 154 feet (47 m) on Broadway, and 200 feet (61 m) on Fulton Street. According to the New York City Department of City Planning, the lot has an area of 36,775 square feet (3,416.5 m2). 195 Broadway shares a block with the Millennium Hilton New York Downtown hotel to the west. Other nearby buildings include St. Paul's Chapel to the north, the Fulton Center and Corbin Building to the east, and the World Trade Center Transportation Hub and 3 World Trade Center to the west.
Architecture
Though William Welles Bosworth is credited as the architect, the design of 195 Broadway was largely influenced by AT&T head Theodore Newton Vail. According to Bosworth, "It was the aim of Mr. Vail that should express the ideal the Telephone Company stands for." For the lobby, Bosworth was inspired by the design of the Parthenon's porticos and Egyptian hypostyles to create "a forest of polished marble" supported by massive columns.
Bosworth's design was heavily Greek-influenced; it featured layers of gray granite columns in Doric and Ionic styles, and a lobby that included 43 oversized Doric columns made of marble. Many building details, such as the columns and the metal grilles above each entrance bay, were nearly identical copies of similar features on classical Greek buildings such as the Parthenon and the Temple of Artemis. Bosworth also incorporated several "architectural refinements" that Brooklyn Museum professor William H. Goodyear had noted as being characteristic of Greek architecture, including column spacing and progressively smaller columns at higher floors Ornament was yet another important part of the design and was ubiquitous within 195 Broadway. Bosworth later wrote that he was "immensely proud" of the 195 Broadway design, from which he drew all of his subsequent Greek-inspired designs.
The main structure is 27 stories, including its attic and double-height lobby. The Dey Street annex, along the southern portion of the building, was an L-shaped structure at the corner of Dey Street and Broadway with an extension reaching Fulton Street. The westernmost 33 feet (10 m) on Fulton Street was designed like a campanile to fit with its narrow and tall form. The campanile is 29 stories high.
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History
From its 1885 establishment to 1910, AT&T was headquartered at 125 Milk Street in Boston. The current building at 195 Broadway was constructed under the leadership of AT&T's president Theodore Newton Vail, who had taken the role in 1907 and assumed the same title at Western Union in 1909 when that firm was purchased by AT&T. At the time, the site was occupied by the Western Union Telegraph Building.
In 1910, AT&T revealed plans to improve Western Union's offices "for the accommodation of the public and the welfare" of workers. Bosworth, who designed the John D. Rockefeller estate at Kykuit, was offered the commission to design a headquarters building at 195 Broadway in November 1911. Simultaneously, work proceeded on 24 Walker Street, a shared-operations building erected further north between 1911 and 1914
Critical reception
In 1914, a writer for The New York Times stated that Bosworth and AT&T officials had collaborated to provide a building that would serve as "an artistic addition to the towering commercial structures of the lower part of the city", with a well-planned interior design. Kenneth Clark, writing for Architectural Record, stated that the detail paid to the Greek-inspired features was among the building's "strongest points". In 1922, an anonymous writer in The American Architect: Architectural Review said that the materials of 195 Broadway "stand for permanency both inside and out". At the time, the neoclassical style was being used in headquarters buildings across the U.S., and Bosworth convinced AT&T officials to erect the headquarters in the Greek neoclassical style.
By the time Kalikow took ownership of 195 Broadway in 1984, he saw that the cast-bronze interior ornamentation had been painted, and said that "I got the feeling that what were trying to do was play it all down They didn't want anyone to know they lived in a palace."
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